Over a hundred slaps

He Who Gets Slapped from 1924 is a somewhat lackluster movie, given what one would expect from the combined mad energies of director Victor Sjöström (watch The Phantom Carriage instead) and actor Lon Chaney (watch The Penalty instead). Apart from some refreshing moments, such as the main character’s open delight at the bloody carnage committed by a lion he has let loose (for reasons that would only disappoint you, so better watch West Of Zanzibar instead), it’s stale waters, with a storyline straight out of an impotent teenage revenge fantasy (as in: they’re gonna be sorry once I’m dead), and the clichéd circus setting also doesn’t help (watch The Unknown instead). Still, the movie is interesting for the brilliant setpiece it revolves around, a circus performance that deserves a reading separate from the machinations that it motors.

Chaney plays a scientist who has made a discovery which will bring him fame and fortune. Unfortunately his presentation at the academy is hijacked by his baron benefactor, who claims the discovery as his own and immediately proceeds to move in with the scientist’s sweetheart. The man barely survives this both emotional and professional shock, and lives on only “to laugh at life.” . . . Years later we meet him in the circus ring, where he is realizing his little scheme for maximum laughter and abjection: “The brilliant scientist had, with a supreme gesture of contempt, made himself a common clown,” a title card informs us. He has designed a lavish production number with tons of allegorical props carried around, which circles around HIM, the clown, receiving as many slaps from his entorage as he possibly can: HE will make commonplace pronouncements about the world being round or flat and receive immediate punishment. As the man is gang-slapped and carried around in mock burial procession, the audience fall over themselves in hysterical laughter. There is a simple correlation between number of slaps received and audience gratification: “Over a hundred slaps last night, HE—you lucky fellow! Soon you’ll be getting famous,” his colleagues cheer him backstage.

There is a subversive element in this a priori assumption that schadenfreude will give the viewer such immediate pleasure:

Well it isn’t true, since I don’t laugh, I protest, but of I course know a whole industry of physical comedy was then thriving on the automatized feelgood factor of schadenfreude. So other people laughed, and they still do. It’s a nice touch that the title card is putting the physical slap last, to insinuate that when you have laughed at somebody slipping on a banana peel, you will of course have laughed at somebody taking a spiritual beating. The performance builds on cultural assumptions that are true even if you don’t recognize yourself in their generalized features. You are made to take responsibility for why the others laugh.

The clown takes each beating with glee, because every slap raises even more violent laughter and thus makes the performance worthier, as if being slapped were somehow a personal achievement, as if the quality of performance and the feedback of an audience under the artist’s control would only in turn provoke the slaps from extras who have been hired to perform that task. Again, shifting responsibilities toward an audience that is given no choice, and stressing the involuntarily participatory nature of this work.

The most famous slapfest in art history is of course the performance Light/Dark by Marina Abramovic and Ulay from 1977. The score is simple, it reads: “In a given space. We kneel, face to face. Our faces are lit by two strong lamps. Alternately, we slap each other’s face until one of us stops.”

In the beginning, the two are almost like a slow kinetic sculpture. Arms are stretched, their weight is made visible, hands are placed on cheeks with great deliberation. Volume in space, skin over bone, movement against mass. There seems no great psychology involved—here are merely two performance artists taking their craft seriously. Soon the slapping becomes automatic, and the need for development arises, for a sort of story arc. Thus the slapping accelerates. Abramovic sets the pace, she hits quickly, impatiently, to get each slap over with, she doesn’t really hit for effect. Ulay keeps up the deliberation, giving his slaps a little twist from the wrist. He’s obviously the more powerful, the one more into the act. But also, he anticipates each slap he receives, screwing his face up harder and harder in anticipation. He is closer to play-acting, or maybe one could compare him to a guitar soloist making discrete faces. 

They speed up. Once they’re over a hundred slaps each, this looks like serious work. While the determination doesn’t flag, the steadily but slowly accelerating tempo drags a bit storywise, though. There is no place this can go really. Except of course if real emotion were involved, and they’d start hating each other, or pretending to. But they are too damn professional for that. The slaps get faster and harder, though the arms must ache by now, still the actors/actionists stay neutral. Cheeks are deformed and lazily wobble back into shape. Ulay makes ever sillier faces. Then he swings, and Abramovic feints, moving her head back, and that’s it. The merest hint of a disappointed expectation of post-coital relief.

There is a traditional reading to this, how it is about violence, preferably domestic violence. The male indeed does appear dominant, his slaps have a power that forbid true equality of the sexes. If Abramovic’s reactions wouldn’t be so short-tempered, if she’d put more thought into strategy, things might look better for womanhood—as it is, the man gets way more slapping time. I, the viewer, support all of this, I am again a responsible bystander. And I’m not just part of the narrative, like in the Chaney film, instead my pretenses to being an art connoisseur endorse these acts of violence (and that’s not mere theory, remember the performance where audience members had to save Abramovic from suffocating after she had fainted inside a circle of fire).

Still, since everything remains in control, I can gauge my own emotional reactions as if under laboratory conditions in real time: does it hurt me more when the woman is slapped, why is that, how come it seems 
wrong both when I feel for the woman and when I don’t?

I would want to see Ulay cry . . .

I cannot work up any emotional involvement, though, these are just reactions my mind tells me I’m supposed to have. Because what I see is still only two professionals who are damn good at doing their work. I see two athletes trying to overcome their physical limitations for the best possible performance. On top of that, their show has a solid theme. Their images translate immediately and with force. The audience reaction is as hardwired as the laughter in He Who Gets Slapped. Only, where the film had the fictional audience on the screen react as a postulate of my own behavior, and I was free to react against that, Abramovic and Ulay leave me no freedom except to quit reading their performance figuratively and instead view the abstract effort.

And then she dodges a hit, and, though after 20 minutes as a watcher you’re somewhat blunted, you still think: that’s it? No more? The average boxer takes much more. Lon Chaney took much more, he’d been stabbed and stood up dying to take another slap. That was the limit? Pussies.

If this were not my blog but I was paid for 500 proper words, then I’d have to give you the whole iconographical works about domestic violence and such. Funnily, though, I suspect I’d have the artist’s support in not believing the iconographic implications of this piece. The catalog for Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA retrospective comes with a CD that contains her commentary track to the catalog, page by page (a brilliant idea which unfortunately lacks in the execution, since her voice mostly repeats well-chewed over statements to the works illustrated). Her comment on Light/Dark was still a surprise to me, the shortest of all, a mere ten seconds: “Light/Dark piece was really about the sound. It’s about how to use the body as a sound instrument.”

Now if one took that seriously, this would be the most crappy piece of sound art ever. Instead I take it as a permission not to believe in the psychological implications that this performance's iconography seems to suggest.

The Placeholders

“I wonder,” thought the Hedgehog, “if the horse lies down to sleep, will it choke in the fog?” And slowly he began to make his way downhill to get into the fog and see for himself what it was like inside there. “Oh, look! I can’t see my paw!” —S. Kozlov

Look here are human beings too

Let us begin at the beginning, in the primordial stew, if you will. A sauce made from fresh tomato, zucchini, and canned tuna fish, cooked by the artist himself in 1998. It struck me then that while this was his first painting which had immediately to do with our reality, it wasn’t a simple still life, wasn’t about a hard stare at what’s in front of you. Instead I called it an icon as it guarded over what mattered in our lives: this sauce over spaghetti independently served as our staple food all through our student days. It must have been a spiritual thing, since it didn’t even taste good, none of us ever found out how to prepare it correctly, so the tuna tended to take on an awful wet cardboard texture. Still we cooked that sauce, again and again. The painting now sits on my bookshelf and stares me hard in the back of the neck as I write this.

And here we should be reasonably close to the real beginning in art-historical terms. It’s a phalanx of small paintings which contain a lot of the formal explorations to follow while still being grounded in a small patch of home turf. These are Stadien from 2001 in an early playful hanging. The title translates as either arenas or as stages in a development. And truly these pieces contain several stages, most apparent a balancing of the representational versus the abstract that very systematically tackles right at the outset of Tim Eitel’s oeuvre a fundamental problem every painter has to find a stance on. The choice of a sports court feels obvious for that task, since it has straight and regularly curved lines painted on it—a utilitarian drawing from real life that can be balanced into a satisfying composition.

Even in paintings that might seem to exist for purely formal reasons, we should at least take the time and check the subject for emotional content. So suppose these were sports courts in the life of the young artist, who wouldn’t take to ball games naturally. Out on the court, in his attempt to avert the gaze from active play so that his teammates would not pass him the ball, his eye would necessarily hit on these angles . . .

I ask him if there’s anything to that and he says no.

In one of the paintings, there is a fashion-conscious woman standing with her gaze directed toward the left edge, and another canvas sees a female figure partly outside the frame. The shadows they cast on the scene make it clear that they’re standing in front of a landscape painting within a painting. People gazing at paintings or at nature as if it were a painting, viewers striking poses as role models or model recipients, this kind of double play, with or without a single remove, was to become central over the next work period . . . but the two paintings also reach out toward the present work: a boy in a fog bank, throwing a shadow unto the thick soup surrounding him, as if it were a picture he was considering to enter.

I have what feels like a distinct recollection of staying in the artist’s studio at the old Leipzig cotton mill for a visit. I’m sure it’s a composite memory, patched together from different situations, still it’ll have to do: waking up very early as the light hit unrestrained through the huge windows of the old redbrick, I was lying on a mattress on the gray concrete floor—a smooth, unreal gray, since the artist had just painted over the traces of earlier occupants with a fresh coat of color. Somebody was up already practicing cello down the hall, sounding like a hangover from the relentless pounding of the downstairs club called Tangofabrik through most of the night. I looked up at a painting on the wall hit by yellow sunlight, there was the half figure of a young woman in profile, with her gaze directed toward the left edge of the canvas, and where as a backdrop I remembered there used to be sky and a landscape with trees and stuff when I’d last seen it yesterday, there now was something like a smooth concrete wall with a huge round window, inscribing the figure in a near perfect circle, and somehow the thought bothered me of the landscape buried beneath the clean outlines as I tried to go to sleep again.

Now these were the two work groups at the heart of the oeuvre until the mid-decade: people viewing art within gallery spaces, inscribed into the dynamic of modernist architecture, or people out in recreational areas, as close to nature as one would get on a daytrip from urban civilization.

The museum interiors felt absolutely spot-on, because it made immediate sense for the artist to explore the uses his paintings would serve at that early point in his career. So yes of course these would become commodity objects for the white cube (within that strangely apart system, the art world, that strangely allows an artist to do great work both for and against it), and they would become respectable carriers of cultural tropes hanging on museum walls. Both his own paintings or classics from Mondrian to Murakami made their cameos, and the painted viewers measuring up to them brought their own self-conscious pose into the painted exhibition space, and the resulting confrontation made both parties look good. The spaces could become quite close, though, the paintings quite dark, especially when there were no discernible artworks to fix the gaze and the museum architecture became a tailor-made enclosement of the pictured viewer frozen in the futile defense of a doubtful gesture.

 The full impact of these paintings could of course only be experienced in an actual exhibition situation, when the real-life viewer was all but forced to relate to the posturing on view. Here are two snapshots I took at the solo exhibition in Backnang in 2005. The first reaction you see is imitation (the woman mimicking the pose in the painting was by the way not talking about the art, while she drew the sleeves halfway over her hands instinctively feeling cold for the bathing figure behind her).

The second photo shows the self-consciousnesses of a whole catalog of viewers side by side, trying to emulate the reflective pose of the protagonist on the picture itself. Here the classic back figure, which we know so well especially from romantic paintings—and Caspar David Friedrich has often been cited as a main influence on the artist—is extended into the room by the viewer, of course referencing the pretty sorry tradition of installation photographs that show the work with a viewer in front of it to gain a sense of proportion and not make the artwork look quite so lonely.

Of course I do not know how a contemporary viewer would really have felt facing the back of a figure in a Caspar David Friedrich painting; today at least these have aged less well than the landscape in front of them. Maybe it’s just the clothing, but these back figures are hard to identify with, instead I’d rather elbow them out of the way because they stand between myself and the (sublime) subject. I may be aware that the figure does the same thing as me, staring at nature in more or less wonderment, but the distance in time and fashion has become so great that it doesn’t make me empathetically self-aware.

The fact that I find it much easier to identify with Tim Eitel’s paintings, no matter if they take place in nature or a museum, may be because they depict people just like me. But then it also may be that they in return identify with me more closely. You will probably know Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, an arrogant fop standing on a boulder looking down on ridges drowned in clouds, all lofty aspirations, and if you want to read uncertainty of fate into that master figure (as is usually done), you have to paint both man and nature as two superheroic forces holding each other in deadlock.

Against that, for the kid standing facing the fogbank we’ve seen above, it is composure in the face of the unknown that is his own little victory. “Oh, look! I can’t see my paw!”

So when we went out into the countryside, as far as daytrip would take us, we went there to view nature as if it were art. So estranged were we that we managed to consume what we were supposed to be part of in the first place, be it art, or nature. We were not scrambling about as the figures in Friedrich’s Rügen, that satire on mass tourism, but kept our distance, not out of awe, more out of an awkward sense that the pose would not resonate as in more accustomed surroundings.

Landscape is a huge topic, and a painter will have to compete against, say, both a Ruysdael, who portrayed the gnarly souls of trees, and a Gainsborough, who painted deliciously feathery brushes straight out of landscape gardening. Today, the backdrop has receded even farther. The woman in Abend from 2003, after she has overstepped the sand trail that marks the visual borderline between foreground and distance, will still remain a tourist in her own painting. While the artist takes us as far as we’re willing to go, there can be no beyond within that line of questioning.

It’s a privilege of close familiarity with an artist that you get to root for them and feel emotionally involved in every step of their development. You start guessing what’s up next, and will they hit the exact point when they need to come up with something new, or will they have to tread water until a pathbreaking idea finally materializes. Will the next exhibition reveal a luminous masterpiece, or will you have to apply your utmost connoisseurship to dig up the hidden qualities within the art to save face in front of anyone who knows that you somehow care.

When the artist went to the U.S. in 2005, first to L.A., then New York, I of course had placed my bets on how L.A.’s sunny, car-driven culture and New York’s picturebook metropolism must surely affect the painting (I’ve never been to these places, so I have to operate on suchlike clichés, I’m afraid). Just see these photos the artist as a young man took on a tourist trip to New York: the city looked like film noir and early Jarmusch alright.

In retrospect I notice that I’ve constructed a very pat narrative, where everything fits a little too well together, grounded just firmly enough in something resembling reality that I can’t help doing it. The storyline runs like this: as soon as the artist arrived at the West Coast, his paintings became all dark gray and muddy, like he was overcompensating beach life through some extra heavy interior sunglasses.

And when the artist settled in New York in 2006 (here a view from his studio window that, mostly due to the bridge, meets all my expectancies for a stylish locale there), it felt like his subject matter would change completely. He produced some large canvases that leant themselves to metaphor, showing detachments of people in environments whose level of abstraction seemed potentially hostile. And then there were pictures almost as blunt in topic as they were shadowy in treatment, of homeless people or still lifes of their belongings on shopping carts, all in shades of gray so dull they sucked the light out of any exhibition space.

When I see Rauch from 2006, my first reaction is to fondly remember how I read Jules Verne as a child. Verne’s calculated and rather pedantic sense of wonder taught me how to build something concrete out of the unruly figments of imagination. Even if that concrete thing might not be as sublime as originally projected, at least it now existed. Here, it’s the writer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth that the figures seem to fit into, when they’re traveling through cathedral-like caves made of thick smoke over a flat ground. Shrunk and sent on a fantastic voyage into their inner selves. These are just associations that I have, and not intended references on the artist’s part, but anyway, it is this kind of narrative space that opens up—running deeper than the media imagery of explosions and other catastrophes that you might associate with the smoke formations—when you try to decipher the gray ground in the paintings of this period. The gray isolates the anecdotal evidence appearing within, framing it, and attributing it special import. As we’ve seen, earlier figures tended to be isolated by abstract lines and planes that could have happened in real-life spaces, which meant a sort of home to them. But here in the smoke, there is nothing outside, all is concentration along the one sightline, a single, possibly inward view.

As these figures do not have an aestheticized arrangement of lines and planes to call a home, and they do not find themselves anchored within the socializing context of a clever composition, they instead become the sole focal points of their paintings, worlds unto themselves, their own centers of gravity, attracting discarded movable property. Their energy, though, makes that the pictures are not completely dark, there is some warmth, even tenderness.

It all happens in the safety of the studio (now set up in Paris), a laboratory for flattening the world ideally in a way that seems to add an extra dimension. So could this be an exploitation art, in the same way that painters have used the graphic violence of Christian mythology or the sensual thrill of perfumed exoticism? I’d say no, since the art will not use the individual subject as material for metaphor, or as an ornament in formalism, but instead it is an art about that individual, in and out of the picture.

You must believe in painting for this. You must believe in some sort of transfiguration taking place on the canvas. What that transfiguration might be, apart from the work involved and the skill and focus, is not easy to define. A simple camping bed can become pregnant with meaning when it is painted. Is that too easy an achievement? The outcome indeed depends on the layers of meaning hidden in the object itself (as it does in object art based on the readymade).

The most loaded subject of course is the human figure, but it also can be the most meaningless if it only suggests a vague “us” as a species. Then again, even when we can’t sufficiently read the figure’s alignments or its individuality, the surroundings might still offer it up as a placeholder for our own sensibilities. That is what most of Tim Eitel’s larger gray paintings do. The small canvases, on the other hand, often get quite close to the subject, sometimes approaching the anecdotal in the process, projecting somebody to identify with. Of course identification in art is different from the narrative media, like film: there are no role models, a painting will mostly offer a gesture or expression that has immediacy and a surprising similarity to whatever the viewer will bring to the picture with a desire for it to be completed. The process is subjective and mood-dependent, yet it has to do with truthfulness of depiction.

Or maybe the viewer identifies through the brushwork. Think of Adriaen Brouwer, who dealt in painting country yokels in pub fights for the urban dweller to feel superior to. As soon as his simple subjects take a breath, he can’t help lending them a sense of dignity that seems to almost unavoidably come with him being so fine a painter. I still do not feel very close to his people, again, like with Friedrich, I cannot bridge the centuries, and his original customers would presumably have felt a similar distance. But as we slowly begin to make our way into the painting and see for ourselves what it has to offer, the truth of it becomes delightfully clear, and we make connection. “Look here are human beings too.”

(This post is a slight edit of my essay for the catalog to Tim’s current exhibition at Hakgojae gallery in Seoul. No colors today, since that was our original plan for the references, large spreads in glorious black and white.)

A roomful of replicas

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Berlin for the opening of the Keith Rowe exhibition at Lüttgenmeijer. Should you check this blog because you've been there, have read the embedded remix of my Rowe essay (see below) for the occasion, and are curious for more: there will be another post on the artist up in a couple of weeks or so, right after a vicious slapfight between Lon Chaney and Marina Abramovic. Stay tuned . . .

UPDATE, early September. As you can tell, I've been distracted. Some of the stuff I've been writing can eventually go up here, too, but I'll have to wait till some grass grows over it. I had hoped I could meanwhile link you to the Rowe essay mentioned above, but it's still not up on the gallery site yet. So if you want to read it, just drop me a line at spurdertoene[at]mail.com, and I will send you a pdf.

UPDATE, two days later. Ha! You can now download a pdf with exhibition views and the text of my essay from the gallery site. Additional payoff to this document is how conscentiously I took the fact that I hadn't yet seen one of these works in the original, that it might completely change my perception to encounter them in the flesh, only to be greeted by a roomful of replicas!

Cheers, Lutz

My gaze holds the tableau in balance

The right figure is the artist. Well, at least it looks like him, and everyone takes it to be a self-portrait, but he says it isn’t or at least we’re not supposed to be sure. But I say to him, look, that guy sees into the future, the back of his head tells me that, and the future for a figure in a painting can only be the finished painting, and only the artist can visualize that. I’m not really sure, though, what makes me know that he’s looking into the future, that he’s seeing shapes taking form within the fogbank looming before him. Is it just that overly ambitious posture in which he lies there consuming, devouring nature? If he’s not careful he’ll pop a vertebra—this guy relaxes like Tom Cruise on the run. Of course, he has reason to be a little nervous, since as the artist he’s the only one in the picture who consciously feels the viewer’s gaze piercing his back. He feels we’re judging his performance, on more than one level.

In the middle, that is the art. Not a symbolic personification of all art, but a stand-in for the works that the artist painted before, pictures of individuals that could not function as they seemed lost to their surroundings which receded to make room for an isolating gray. Sometimes homeless people, like this figure now lying shoeless on a thin blanket. His head is still wrapped in foggy reminiscence of the past, but it seems like a withdrawal into self-awareness is imminent. An action, a small defensive movement, will suffice for a complete change of position.

On the left, that’s me. (I’m half-pissed that I don’t have a cameo here, after all the artist, Tim Eitel, is my brother, so he should one day put me out of my mortality.) No, I’m only in the picture as the viewer. My gaze holds the tableau in balance, my knowing acceptance of things as they are. I do not meddle with the art. I seem to have a defeatist sense of humor. I tell the viewer without the picture how to read the scene, my attitude reveals that the misty mass is not The Fog of movie stardom, a natural habitat for things that will kill us. It is more like the inner void as an alive canvas for projections.

If the above reads a little too willful, of course it is. What desire I feel to project any kind of concrete meaning into the figures stems from their subtle incongruousness: they are almost like collaged together. The scene isn’t a group, all three postures seem so individual. Where are they from? The right figure, as it lies by the water, makes me think of a fountain by Ammannati, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the middle were a variation on a posture from that supreme quarry of existential poses, The Raft of the Medusa. But somehow the possibility of art-historical references doesn’t interest me here. Reflection the painting is called. But none of the protagonists is aware of the reflected image of self. Which does bring us to another artwork, Caravaggio’s Narcissus, of all the pond paintings I can think of the most relevant here.

The Caravaggio painting is supposed to be about a youth who cannot avert his gaze from a reflection of his own beauty (and he will die for that and, if we follow Ovid’s silly conceit, sort of turn into a flower). It doesn’t at all look like it, though. We do not see the youth lost in himself, but rather locking gaze with his other half, which is reflected in the pond. Since they both part off the space between them in almost a perfect circle, with the knee at the heart (in Caravaggio I’m sure with strong sexual connotations) it seems more like pondering the pond itself, from both sides. Reflecting upon nature to come closer to our own nature, a study of life force and the way we contain the whole world within ourselves because we cannot see from outside and must remain self-centered.

And this, more complex but less to the point, is about where Tim’s painting takes off, too. Three attitudes towards that, maybe. Tim’s effort is not allegory, that was what immediately struck me when I first saw the painting hanging in the gallery: it was not, like many of Tim’s earlier efforts, a painting that tried to be about people. Take his Boat from 2004, it is splendid allegory on the human condition, but the artist’s viewpoint is from above, indicating the demiurgic will to make that scene happen before our eyes. In Reflection (from 2010, by the way), we’re really all in the same boat, or rather on the same narrow strip of wasteland. Protagonist, artist and beholder alike. And, I don’t know, that made me feel upbeat when I saw it. It’s such an optimistic painting, did you notice?

All ego is lost to meaning

“As a painter, Arnold Schönberg was a one-hit wonder. You will find The Red Gaze from 1910 in a lot of modern art primers, despite the fact that it’s a pretty bad painting. (Should you feel in the mood to challenge that verdict: look at the shape of the eyes. They have been carefully drawn by an artist biting his tongue, and they carry no expression all. The superficial energy of the gaze lies solely in the make-up.) Why has this picture become a part of the wider canon? And not one of those that look more interesting to our eyes today, like the clumsy proto-Gustons and the hilarious proto-Condos? (Well, apart from the fact that our painting has come to look like the ghost of Andy Warhol?) . . .”

That’s only a teaser, if you want to read on you have to get issue 6 of Eartrip, a pdf mag on freely improvised and other adventurous musics edited by David Grundy. My article is not about Schönberg, but rather the visual art of two European musicians, Peter Brötzmann and Keith Rowe, explored mostly through what they have put in the gallery of their record covers. Do download, give it a read, then report back.

Thanks. I’ve lately been thinking much about the use of references, how they work or don’t, and if there’s an established way of reading them. Simply because I can’t help doing it myself, even if it doesn’t really interest me: still, you want to pretend you’re doing hard science onto a piece of contemporary art, then you have to sleuth out unconscious forebears and conscious references and write an ersatz art history around them. Is that kind of thing more rampant now than it has been? Since I have neither the authority nor the miles for blanket statements diagnosing trends, I am lucky to have stumbled across a Frieze article by Dan Fox, who thinks the fault is in the art, not in the way I read it. “Confusing the footnote with the essay,” he calls this bad habit: “Sociologists use the term ‘prostheses’ to describe how people use the symbolic value of the clothes they wear or items they own in order to demonstrate their cultural competence or literacy. In contemporary art, we can identify this in the referential turn—‘X work references Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of Dasein and the music of Donna Summer in order to . . .’ etc. As a strategy that has permeated the way much work is made and is signposted for interpretation, it has now entered its mannerist phase. Critical value gets transferred from the formal or conceptual functions of objects and images to the collection and arrangement of impeccably chosen cultural products, events and historical allusions. In many cases (though not all), the auratic value of a well-appointed suite of references creates a smokescreen of illusory scholarship and can falsely imply an historical lineage between the artist doing the referencing and the thing being referenced. It masks the fact that creatively little is being done such sources in the first place.”

I agree with most of that, except for the underlying value system. (And hey, I’m more aggressively highbrow than Fox, since I mention Renaissance hermeticism in my discussion of Rowe’s rich table of connotations, while Fox talks of a “mannerist phase”—these being two currents within the same intellectual movement.) In contrast I enjoyed myself, I had a field day trying to decode the Rowe paintings a little beyond the artist’s remarks published in interviews, and with reasonable success, I flatter myself. The central point here may be that the art doesn’t expect me to be able to read anything out of it, the connotations are in there not for purposes of communication, but because the artist feels that they should be in there. And when I put some effort in, I get the reward of discovering that all is in place for a reason, and I learn to trust the artist even where I’m clueless. Which means from then on I simply dare to enjoy without intellectual remorse. (Trust being a fundamental virtue in contemporary art.) The references don’t seem about establishing an “illusory scholarship,” but rather about the artist placing himself through thoughts and enthusiasms. Now excuse me while I quote Jeff Koons, who seems to have regularly recurring epiphanies in front of his own recent photoshop collage paintings: “When I look at the paintings and realize all the historical references, it’s as if, for a moment, all ego is lost to meaning.” To him, it’s about “the dialog of art,” and I think his approach works very well. While his new paintings are later work that is way past ambition, and while (despite the continuing myth of perfectionism and a workforce of dozens in the studio) the execution has mostly become rather sloppy, when Koons layers a doodle after Courbet’s Origin Of The World with the blow-up of a drawing that his own kid has done, then that is conceptually a beautiful move.

And then I think of Stop, Repair, Prepare, a smash hit from 2008 for Allora & Calzadilla, who destroy a grand piano (referencing Fluxus) by sawing a round hole into it (referencing Matta-Clark), preparing the strings (referencing Cage) and sticking a musician through the hole (referencing Andrea Neumann’s inside piano), who plays the “Ode to Joy”—well, that makes Beethoven part of the form of the work, so that’s not a reference, but since the music’s a readymade of course it references Duchamp, and the performance history of the music references Furtwängler’s Dilemma and the whole Erbauungskultur of the Nazis . . . Stop, Repair, Prepare is well crafted, rich with surface text, a pleasing arrangement of meanings behind historical probabilities and performative facts, there is the real-life allegory of the player pushing a piano around the gallery and some music everybody can hum to.

But what have they done to the references? The “Ode to Joy,” I learn from the catalog, was actually played in 1933 at the laying of the foundation stone of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where official Nazi art would be shown during the Third Reich. That was also the place where Allora & Calzadilla’s piece was first realized, and at that exact spot the choice of music makes real and deep sense. But when the piece is exported to gallery spaces, that sense seems to vanish behind a smokescreen indeed: the artists’ “research” collected in the catalog tells me that “The Ode to Joy” was adopted as the National Anthem of Rhodesia, it served as a soundtrack to a popular japanese anime series, Pope Benedict likes it and so do the Maoist guerilla of Peru, it was played at the official bringing down of the Berlin wall and at the 1938 Reichsmusiktage for a pleased Adolf Hitler . . . it goes on and on, a bit much for a single work of art to handle. It’s often unfair to quote catalog essays, but here we go: Allora & Calzadilla “dismantle Beethoven’s ‘hymn to humanity.’” That’s a brave act. What worked so very well with the very concrete frame of reference at the original place of performance, now has become overblown holier-than-thou scattershot self-importance for easy consumption.

The other two major references don’t fare much better. The circular hole in the piano transforms it into a shell for the player, and the artists have even switched the piano pedals so that they show inwards and can still function. That is all so very useful (despite the Sisyphean note of the player having to push the grand around, it’s still useful for the purpose of performance) and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Matta-Clark ripping up the shells of our cocoons, except an exact quote of the form. Same with Cage: the piano is prepared to somehow distort the music, which is an evergreen through ages and cultures. That’s a most questionable act of having your cake and eating it: taking the most popular music in the world and delighting everybody with the fact that they will recognize it, then incorporating some token strange sounds so it all will appear like serious art. Which has of course nothing to do with experimental music, or music period. In fact I think it’s pretty offensive, pure exploitation of something that has come to signify eternal avant-garde. And the exploitation is what makes the piece so popular, even with the critics, despite the fact it has no more poetry than a table of contents. Oh wait, Roberta Smith says it has poetry.

If only it were really in homage to Andrea Neumann (hey, they’re all part of the Berlin scene, they should know each other). It would simply be called Innenklavier, they would stick her in it and she’d perform funny noises in off-spaces. That would be brilliant, even with the strings attached.

An obsession with innovation

Just a short postscript to my earlier post on Carl Hofer. I have found the kitchen painting I’d been looking for: Girl With Coffee Grinder from 1954. My memory for once hasn’t betrayed me, it’s a touching painting full of worldliness. Stylistically it is obvious that Hofer took his cue mostly from the late efforts of the French old masters of classical modernism, to try and loosen himself up a little. Contentwise, this is oh so literal, right down to the clock: Darn it we’re late already, coffee hour is 4pm sharp in this household. Ah, what is the silly girl dreaming about again.

If one considers the turf battle Hofer was involved in during these years, one might expect every single painting from him would read like a manifesto. He was busy fighting an “obsession with innovation that had taken on the form of a sickly hysteria serving nobody except the vain craving for recognition of the so-called avant-gardists.” (Thoughts On Abstract Art from that same year, 1954.) He viciously (in post-war Germany) equaled being part of the current art movements with blindly following “the party.” In an interview with a glossy, the 75-year old director of the Berlin Art Academy confessed, “When I found out how easy non-figurative painting was, I quickly lost interest in the genre,” which lead to quite a storm in the tea pot with several colleagues leaving the German Künstlerbund in protest. And Hofer backs it all up with a dreamy coffee grinder in a funny nouvelle vague hat, the gratuitous amount of her visible undergarment suggesting that he’s playing a sickly bourgeois and repressedly wanton Greuze to Picasso’s Fragonard. Which is a good thing for one single picture.

The first commercially released electric coffee grinder hit the German market two years later and was a smashing success right from the start.

Of human ambition

I don’t usually do hilarious, but this is irresistible. A Henry Moore book from 1973 called Energy In Space. If you’re not immediately sure what the above image does to you, let me read you the front flap: “All at once the beholder grasps, in a truly elemental way, the aims of one of the greatest artists of our century and becomes aware of those parallels and affinities which fuse the sculptures with their environment.” All at once, so quit brooding and immerse. See what strength the female figure gains (symbolized by the very determined block of a right forearm) from the mammary dome rising behind her. It mimicks a desert landscape, and immediately the parched skin of the sculpture begins to crack under the dry heat.

The premise of the book actually makes sense. Art in public space seldom gets to fuse with the sublime. See to the right the Moore I’ve grown up with (I took this recent image from wikimedia, I couldn’t find a historical one which shows where it reclined when I was little, it had a spot of grass to itself). Isn’t it sad how inevitably, humorlessly it is displayed now for one-way aesthetic consumption? Which of course works very well, she’s a pro, and she has aged in dignity, growing verdigris wrinkles—but she might as well sit in a cage. When instead she should have a coastline for a Recamier.

There is something I haven’t told you yet. “The photographs included in this volume are the fruits of several years of collaboration between Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Head of the Photography Department at the Royal College of Art in London.” Well. Several years of collaboration. Fruits. Hm, at least I guess I can say I had safely filed Moore away and might never have spent a thought on him again if it weren’t for these “photos.” I usually like Moore, because his sculpture engages the eye and mind in a way that makes traditional values of the medium come alive. When I look at the image to my left, I see the challenge of a problem of form. I become part sculptor myself and try to balance the figure over the cliff a little more comfortably. In contrast to the brutalism of, say, Serra and the school of rust, the scope of Moore’s sculpture seems so very human, and the ambition also seems human. At least I thought so . . .

Imagine the frustration eating up the 75-year old shared greatest artist of the century, mother of all art in public space with a reason for existence. He has strategically occupied every district in the world, mankind learns aesthetics through coping with his problems of form, recreation parks are defined by their ability to picturesquely backdrop a Moore. Still, he needs a rough pair of scissors to effectively fuse his works with nature. How sad must it be to be able to envision an artwork that’s on an equal footing with nature, to be able to deliver that work, and then to have to live with the fact that the best habitat it can hope for is a few shrubs on a trampled spot of green where the dogs do their business. Is it any wonder, then, that there is a secret desire he harbors in his cooling heart: to rape a lakeside with two oval shapeshifters in nazi dimensions, two giant golden needle eyes through which a rich man can drive his tanker truck over the dead body of the landscape?

Here’s the image at the heart of Energy In Space which tells it all. If it helps you read it: the work the artist pushes around is Two-Piece Knife-Edge. I think the central light must be in allusion to Moore’s atom pieces. Other than that, I give up.

The most representational monochrome abstractions in human history

The artist Rudolf Reiber (remember, he of the Caromboat) has now put everything he ever did or has heard rumored about him into a comprehensive website, as artists should today, because its plain boring when a name that comes up is not immediately exhaustible at a click of the mouse.

Anyway, Rudolf’s site is eminently visitable, and best of all he has his catalogs for grabs as free pdfs, so if you click Words and then Books on the left, you can download German Skies from 2010 and, should you read German or French, follow my instructions on how to approach the pieces step by step. After that, of course you will want to go to the distributor and purchase a physical copy, since the color plates have been tipped in by the artist’s shaky own hand. (If you do not read German or French, there is still Blast of Silence, the first book we did together.)

Above are German Skies in front of the studio before an extra sanding session. One can see at a glimpse that they’re the most representational monochrome abstractions in human history ever delivered to an artist’s doorstep . . .

Some degree of beauty

This is something special. A pietà from 1774 by Ignaz Günther in a chapel on the village graveyard of Nenningen in the Swabian countryside. You’re standing in the back of the small room a little to the right of center. It’s amazing how much the picture changes when you shuffle a few feet sideways. The postcard view is from dead center, more harmonious but also sort of undecided around where the figures grow out of the base. From where you now stand the construction lays bare, and the statics of the load that Mary has to bear become tangible (take the load off her, will you). This is the spot from where you can draw the nicest compositional diagram—there are four cavities: the two mouths, opened in pain past and present, Jesus’ gaping wound, and the hands barely holding each other. Together these four form a cross standing on its head. Some limbs of Jesus are sagging mightily, but part of his body seems to work at keeping upright, exploiting the support that rigor mortis offers and the magnetism of bodily affection. Again, shuffle sideways by a few feet and his left hand which rests in his mother’s in a sort of resigned trust becomes a claw frozen in a final cramp.

Wood is the material to strike this balance, rigid with a hint of flexibility, with a weightiness that seems in relation to the human body. The color mounting fits like a tight skin in a perfect shade of pale, and it’s not like in stone sculpture where a successful impression of something soft and vulnerable always is a virtuosic miracle against nature (and this is not at all meant as a nod to the dead boulder that is Michelangelo’s pièta), but somehow warm and human . . . read Michael Baxandall’s wonderful book on the German limewood sculptors of an earlier epoch to learn how humanism lay in their medium of choice already.

Jesus is worn down by exhaustion from insufferable pain and the exertion of saving our souls; Mary’s grief is dynamic, she has ergonomically followed his body’s contortions to always ease the suffering. Their opened mouths bring to mind that Lessing had published his Laocoön only a few years before, in 1766. You have heard this before: “There are passions and degrees of passion whose expression produces the most hideous contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a state of greater repose. These passions the old artists either refrained altogether from representing, or softened into emotions which were capable of being expressed with some degree of beauty.” It’s highly improbable that Günther had read these words, their two worlds were far apart—the first German freelance writer in Berlin (thanks for the introduction of this form of drudgery, dude) and the leading sculptor of catholic Bavarian “rococo”. But they both were concerned with the same issues, and the sculptor clearly took a lot from classicism in his last years to deepen the emotional impact of his work (which is the opposite direction to the schematizing tendencies of high classicism).

Googling the chapel to verify that I didn’t dream it up, I see that it has suffered a prize-winning restoration three years ago and will now work as a distancing instrument between viewer and art. So read me as a voice from the past.